Asteroides

Asteroides is an arcade space game. Asteroides is a game in which you destroy asteroids* and satelites and what not in order to save the galaxy. The game is extremely unfair, there are way too many enemies, the powerups bounce against obstacles and fly off the screen 99% of the time and most of them really doesn't do much (Rockets do nothing at all?) The game has no menu and pressing the ESC key... closes the game. What about the middle mouse button? That's right, it closes the game too. Like really do some testing before releasing your game. The game has 3 levels which are all the same, 3 uninspired bosses and only 1 space ship and gun. Also, the sound keeps glitching and the controls are super janky. Overall, it's bad, it's short and it's not worth your time, avoid.

Asteroides is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Asteroids (Copyright Atari, 1979)... right down to infringing on the trademarked name. Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Asteroides is considerably worse than Asteroids. What do you do in the game? It's literally just Atari's Asteroids game, but (really badly) rendered in 3D. Tetris Holdings LLC vs Xio Interactive shows us that games themselves, their names, trademarks and mechanics are all subject to copyright law, which the developer here is gleefully infringing on purpose (and, at times, for profit)... this is not just creatively and morally bankrupt, in some parts of the world the extent of this copyright infringement can be seen as breach of criminal law and can result in fines starting around $250,000 and 3 or more years in prison. You can't just steal someone else's game, their IP, or anything else, and try to make profit from it. This is wrong. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $1 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off, but not as much as Atari has been. If/when legal action is taken against the developer for this unabashed copyright infringement, we should expect to see the game removed from Steam.